So bad it's good

The bestseller charts are groaning with real-life accounts of neglect, violence and sexual abuse. The worse your childhood, it seems, the more people want to read about it. Have we turned into a nation of ghouls? Esther Addley investigates the remarkable rise of 'misery lit'

On the day she arrived at her foster house, having been taken from her parental home, Jodie soiled herself, stuck her hand in her knickers and wiped the excrement over her face. Later that evening she cut her arm with a fruit knife and smeared her blood over her body, before trying to climb into bed with her 17-year-old foster brother. A few days later, sitting on a sofa in the family living room, she hitched up her skirt and began to masturbate. She was not yet eight years old.

Jodie's story may be the worst you have ever heard, a tale of horrific abuse from an early age at the hands of a paedophile gang run by her parents. Then again, Kathy's might just surpass it. Kathy was horribly beaten by her father, raped repeatedly from the age of five by two older boys, then locked in a series of institutions where she was forced to take drugs and raped again by a number of different men, giving birth to a child at the age of 13.

And then there is Stuart, whose father raped him repeatedly throughout his childhood, while forcing him to eat pigswill, drink his sister's urine and watch him having sex with pigs. Stuart was abused by paedophiles at his local swimming pool; he became an arsonist, homeless and a cocaine addict. When he was an adult Stuart killed his father with a lump hammer.

These are not, one might say, tales to be read with pleasure. And yet a quite astonishing number of people want to read them all the same. Please, Daddy, No, the almost parodically named account of Stuart Howarth's childhood from hell, sold more than 13,000 copies last week, and was until recently at the top of the Bookseller paperback non-fiction list. Damaged, which Cathy Glass wrote about her foster child Jodie, has not yet been published in paperback, but has already sold more than 35,000 copies. Sales of Kathy O'Beirne's autobiography Don't Ever Tell have reached almost 350,000 in the UK, and many thousands more overseas.

Reproducing like bacteria, a new literary genre has wholly infected the bestseller charts. As much as 30% of the non-fiction paperback chart on any given week is made up of accounts of similarly grinding childhood misery. In the hardback chart, meanwhile, Abandoned, Anya Peters's account of a childhood of rejection that culminated with her living in a car, has overtaken the recent hit Wasted, in which Mark Johnson describes the childhood beatings that led to his heroin addiction at 11.

At Harper Non-Fiction, the leading publisher in the genre, these books are known as "Inspirational Memoirs". Waterstone's displays them together on a shelf labelled "Painful Lives". But within the publishing industry, the genre is referred to as "misery lit": volume after volume of leering drunk abusers and their fearful victims, of coarse, grubby hands probing into tiny pairs of knickers and terrified, saucer-eyed children pleading with them to stop. "It is quite amazing the numbers that these books are shifting," says Joel Rickett, deputy editor of the Bookseller, the publishing trade magazine. "I think it was initially seen as a fad in the industry. I remember people saying that [these books] wouldn't work in the UK because they were very American. A lot of the publishers said the same things: we're much more reserved in Britain, we don't like to get our hands dirty. And actually, they were proved utterly wrong.

"It's quite rare to see a genre come out of almost nowhere and to establish itself as core stock, part of any bookshop or book display. But the numbers these are selling are phenomenal. From a publishing perspective there is no let-up in consumer demand."

Most observers trace the birth of misery literature to 2000, and Dave Pelzer's memoir, A Child Called It. In it, the American writer details the story of his outrageously cruel childhood at the hands of his alcoholic mother, who beat, starved, stabbed and burned him, forced him to swallow ammonia and eat the contents of his siblings' nappies, and called him "an It". It rapidly became a bestseller of astonishing proportions. Two sequels and a number of related books later, Pelzer has sold well over 3.5m books in the UK alone.

Pelzer did not come entirely out of the blue - some cite Frank McCourt's bestselling childhood memoir Angela's Ashes and Jung Chang's Wild Swans as precursors to the misery memoir - but it set the terms to which the fledgling genre would increasingly narrowly confine itself. Like Pelzer's, the standard tale begins in childhood, and almost invariably involves some form of abuse at the hands of a trusted adult, usually a parent. It is frequently written in the first person, though not always, tracing a heartbreaking arc of lost innocence and damage. The tale always ends in some form of escape or redemption: Pelzer, for instance, is rescued from his horrendous family situation by the intervention of concerned teachers; Stuart Howarth is freed after 14 months having pleaded guilty to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility.

Pelzer's publishers also set a remarkably rigid pattern for the appearance of a book in this genre: the volumes invariably carry a washed-out close-up of a particularly pretty child's face on a pale background, with the title of the book in handwritten script. As Peter Saxton, biography buyer for Waterstone's, puts it: "White cover, swirly writing, big-eyed child. These are the visual clues that tell prospective buyers that they are going to be in their comfort (or discomfort) zone."

The titles, in fact, may be the only significant digression from Pelzer's model. In the UK at least, these increasingly follow one of two paths: the dramatic past participle (Wasted, Abandoned, Damaged) or the more discursive, directly heartstring-tugging phrase (Daddy's Little Girl; Don't Tell Mummy; Please, Daddy, No). "When I first saw those titles, I thought they were a joke," says Rickett. "I could not believe that a publisher would be so audacious as to put that on a book. It is so wince-making. But actually, commercially, they have judged the mood of the reader very well."

Carole Tonkinson, the publisher of Harper Non-Fiction, agrees that a happy ending is key to a successful memoir of this kind, though she stresses that it may not always be conventionally upbeat. She cites Jodie's story in Damaged: as the book concludes, the reader is not really under any illusions that Jodie, who has moved to a residential home, can expect her problems to be over, or ever, really, to reach a state of much contentment. There is, however, a certain amount of hope offered in the assertion by Glass that, yes, she will foster another child because there is always someone else who will need her help.

"It leaves you feeling aware of Cathy's willingness to continue with her work," says Tonkinson. "There's a sense of love and admiration for people who really go the extra mile. For me, it can't be bleak at the end because they are quite relentless, some of these stories, and there needs to be somewhere to go."

Catharsis - an Aristotelian requirement for purging pity and terror in a successful tragedy - is also cited by Glass as a reason for writing about Jodie in the first place. Glass (a pseudonym) sat down and started writing without any thought of publication, she says; before she knew it, she had a manuscript of 50,000 words.

"And then I just tentatively sent it off in a pretty rough form," she says. "And an agent said, yes, I think this could work. That first draft took about six months, then there were another six months of polishing.

"To begin with, I wrote it for the cathartic experience, and I think to a certain extent it has helped to externalise it. Because while she was with me, [Jodie's] needs were such that it completely took over. But if something stirs your passion, you should write it down. Initially, it becoming a bestselling book was pretty far from my mind. But along the journey I did realise that there was an element that I wanted people to know."

People, gratifyingly, were happy to oblige her, in sizable numbers. Tonkinson says that detailed research does not yet exist, but Harper Non-Fiction estimates that about 85% of misery-lit readers are women, with four-fifths of all sales going through supermarkets. "Supermarkets as a sales channel are very, very key to the rise of this genre," she says. "Nobody really seems to have picked up on the importance of this point. They say only one in six people ever goes into a bookshop. Through the traditional channels you are only ever reaching a tiny proportion of the populace.

"These books are reaching a different reader, by and large. It's an additional market and I think that is what is really interesting for publishers - that, actually, we're growing the readership. It's a really exciting expansion."

None of this addresses the really challenging question about misery literature - why so many people want to read it. As a reader, there is certainly a relief in reaching the end of one of these books, but the faint glimpses of hope and positivity offered at their endings rarely atone for the horrors that one endures to get there. For readers unfamiliar with the genre, it can be an uncomfortable and faintly soiling experience to read explicit narratives of incest and horrific abuse, told in the matter-of-fact chatter of a damaged child and rarely mediated by much literary merit. The authors of these books may feel they are revealing important truths about the situations of some children today, but can they be certain that there isn't a degree of uncomfortable prurience, or worse, in the relish with which such tales are whisked off the shelves?

Readers themselves, in letters to publishers and online reviews sections, cite "inspiration" as a key factor, many stressing how unputdownable they found the work in question. "I felt angry reading this book but also very emotional," notes one reviewer of Please, Daddy, No on Amazon.co.uk. "I kept wondering when someone would notice the problems this little boy was suffering. Having read similar books, this one will stick in my mind for years to come."

One of Glass's readers wrote: "Damaged shook me to the core as images of this little girl's life flashed through my head. How could anyone treat a child as this?" And: "I bought [Damaged] at the airport just as I was about to fly, and by the end of my flight - seven hours - I had finished it," wrote another. "The story is amazing but incredibly sad. This book was very good and not like the usual life stories."

To Saxton, the appeal is easily explained: "Misery, in whatever form, sells, and probably always will. It is doubtful that Oliver Twist would have been quite so successful if its only readers had been people with a keen interest in the 19th-century social system."

But Glass says many readers identify with aspects of the stories. "I have had a lot of letters and emails from people since the publication, from adults who were abused as children. These people say they wept as they were reading it because it just took them back. One chap in his 50s who wrote to me had been as badly abused [as Jodie], if not worse. I've also had emails and letters from other foster carers who said, 'Thank goodness you have told the story.'"

The psychologist and author Oliver James says that such readers, who recognise their own experience in the books, are likely to make up a much bigger proportion than we might like to think. "Although it is true that on the whole, compared with 100 years ago, there are fewer people walking around who had a horrendous childhood, there are still a hell of a lot of people out there who have had neglect, maltreatment, physical and sexual abuse and cruelty inflicted on them. These narratives will provide them with an opportunity to identify, let's say, with the various characters involved."

James also believes, unsettlingly, that for some readers, the books can represent a grotesque and aberrant erotica. "Given that being sexually abused makes you much more likely to become a sexual abuser, there are probably some very complicated things going on when you are reading that stuff. I'm not suggesting that even a minority of the readers are getting off on it, but it may be something more complicated."

For most readers, though, the appeal may be more straightforward. "Downward social comparison is a very important mechanism by which we keep ourselves afloat," James says. Or, as Glass puts it, "I think [my success] is probably for the same reasons that people read all of these memoirs. When you read them you feel that your own lot isn't quite so bad."

Rickett notes that the genre is already starting to evolve and mutate, to spawn subgenres. He cites the pet misery memoir ("various books about dogs and cats that have helped people through difficult times") and celebrity misery memoir ("the celeb mis mem"), the latter having developed alongside but been identifiably shaped by the emerging genre. "It has certainly encouraged a whole range of people to open up in an intense kind of way. Previously, memoirs were all about adult achievement, or rosy, Just William-style stories of childhood, but it's opened up a whole space."

(Notably, the iconography of the genre may be more powerful than celebrity itself. Kim Woodburn, one half of How Clean is Your House's Kim and Aggie, first published her autobiography Unbeaten: The Story of My Brutal Childhood, last year, the jacket to the hardback edition carrying a picture of the TV personality. By the time it was republished in paperback this year, the cover image had been changed to remove Woodburn and conform more closely to the visual cliches of the genre: sepia-toned child, handwritten title and all.)

Even the poet laureate Andrew Motion's memoir In The Blood, a story overshadowed by a terrible riding accident suffered by his mother, was influenced by misery lit, Rickett argues: "I don't know if he would have been able to write or publish that five years ago.

"There is still an element of snobbery in the industry, but most of the big publishing houses have commercially embraced the genre, and the editors who are publishing them really believe in these books. I can't see why it won't stay and evolve, with more and more depth and breadth to the genre. It's too steady now to be blown away by the next wind."

The only challenge for editors, in fact, is to find enough dreadful tales to feed the market. Happily, after their first book proves a surprising success, many successful authors, like Pelzer, find they have another volume in them. Kathy O'Beirne and Howarth are both currently writing sequels to their first memoirs. As for Glass: "HarperCollins and the agent were saying, 'Have you got another story to tell?' and I said, 'Yes, I have got quite a few.'"

Her second book, Hidden: Betrayed, Forgotten and Abandoned, will be published next year.